Prologue Gets an Update

The Prologue introduction earlier this week provided us with a lot of feed back. Based on that feed back we’ve made a few changes:

The front page now shows a stream of recent updates instead of one update per user

Pages now have their own template and look much better

Avatars are only shown once for sequential posts by the same author (front page and tag pages)

Post titles are no longer empty, they are generated based on the beginning of each post

Works out of the box for WordPress.org 2.3.2

The front page on Prologue originally only showed one post per user. Many people were confused by this or didn’t like it. After taking a step back I tend to agree, so a more traditional stream of the most recent posts is now shown. Pages are first class citizens again with their own template. Since posts in Prologue don’t have user supplied titles it now generates a title for WordPress based on the content of the post. This makes other features of WordPress work as expected (like the Recent Comments widget).

For those of you who want to try out Prologue on your own WordPress.org site you’ll be happy to know that it now works with WordPress 2.3.2 out of the box. Initially I’d made use of a function (in the author template) that wasn’t available in 2.3.2, now that has been fixed. Sorry about that.

The version in style.css has been bumped to 1.2. This update is available via Subversion and in use now on WordPress.com.

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97 Comments

Joseph, I’m a little goosy about changing the style of my blog just to try out Prologue. I suppose the only way to find out what the fuss is about is go and create a new blog and give it a whirl? Is there no way to incorporate Prologue into an existing blog without borking what’s already there?

I tried this theme once I got this news, take a look at http://kutucape.com. There are some usability issues so far but this is a great simple but nice theme. Some usabilities issues are:
– user don’t know where to comment. I know there’s a link with number showing the comments, but the average users don’t have a clue what it is. I suggest to change with ex comments (number_of_comments)
– Title is missing. I don’t think I’m the only one to see this bug(?). A post must have a title in it, at least a tiny row contains title. CMIIW

Joseph, I am curious whether i can get a theme like this to post asides. Now if i use prologue to post asides, it doesn’t show the titles of bigger posts. This isn’t the intended use of prologue, ofcourse. But if i can get a theme for asides like this, i can use wordpress as a full-time twitter+blog 🙂

I love Prologue and did exactly what Gerald Buckley above suggested (opened a test blog to check it out). However it would be cool if it could be incorporated into a traditional blog. I don’t have that loyal of bloggers that they’d hit my blog then my prologue 😆

I love the idea on giving the posting stream into recent updates. Then, reader can comment on other pages too. One thing is that I really want to make another blog using these theme.. It’s rock. Thanks for listening to your loyal user…

This has the potential to be the best theme I have seen. Only it needs more options. And some tweaks. Like are larger typing box. Or one where you can set the size of it through customization. To bad it can’t just operate like the write post function, with lots of functions. Then anyone could easily and quickly reply to each others posts while on the same page.

As far as I can tell the theme still does not have support for categories or tags. I mean, you can put something there, but I doesn’t take it, and sort by it. Let me give you an example:

I have categories or tags up on my side bar. I have WORK RELATED there as a category or tag. I type in something, and I tag it WORK RELATED. The post goes to the top of the list, but doesn’t appear under the work related category or tag. And it is auto posted in uncategorized.

Let me try reseting the theme, since I haven’t since you updated it, maybe that will help.

Ah I see how it sorts stuff, a new widget thing, recent projects…ok, but it still doesn’t have support for categories, only tags. And I can’t use it since it doesn’t have password functions, I can’t use it for my community page. I could use this theme if you had the same little text type box thing on each page, then I could use the pages as the separate categories, and just password lock each page, except the community ones…

but then you would have to put the text on each page, or turn it into a widget of some sort. That would be really cool, and instant post widget, for the bottom, or even the side.

let me show you what I’m working with so you can see my point. Otherwise it would be perfect: http://virtualredearth.wordpress.com is the community site I’m still building, where I would use it.

Fantastic idea guys! I was looking for a way to communicate with the Co-authors of my collaborative blog for months. Since a forum was to bloated, E-Mail to un-blog-ish and Chat/IM to unstructured and non-durable, this is the perfect concept. Thank you so much.

Can’t wait to translate it into German, but at the time it’s — of course — a bit to unstable. Any chance to have support for external translations in the SVN version? This .mo/.po-file stuff, you know?

One thing I found very odd — there’s no way to login on the site from the homepage.

Also, the user pages in IE6 aren’t rendered properly — the user icon is somehow chopped off (under a margin or something?)

“I wonder if the folks at Twitter are having some sleepless nights?”

Probably not — this would have a ways to go before it could be as easy or as “connected” as twitter is right now. Certainly possible, but not there yet. Additionally, twitter will always be easier than getting a distributed network setup 🙂

Wow, some of those changes I didn’t even notice in the original! Very awesome, guys, it’s always heartwarming knowing how much input the userbase has with things. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and loved. 🙂

Is there a way to control which category the post is assigned to? Right now, they all appear as “Uncategorized”, ignoring the options>writing>default category setting.

I’d like to incorporate this front-page posting idea into my own blog, but assign all of the posts to “asides”, as a sidebar stream next to the primary blog. To do that, I need to control which category the post is assigned to. Any thoughts?

Hi Joseph, Thanks for listening first of all – I didn’t expect the observations on my test bed were going to be read 🙂 That said I’m actually in two minds about which is better between single post per person per page and multiple.

If a reasonably sized group of people were to use Prologue as a central space for their activities it might be useful to continue to have the option of a single post per person.

Any chance of including this as an option in the admin area so people could decide for themselves? I’m thinking of Prologue as a portal or hub for coordinating the activities of a group of individual bloggers, where the most recent activities of each person could be easily tracked.

In the instance of a classroom activity for example, if the single post option remained, an instructor could quickly read through the latest Prologue updates from his students to see what they were up to.

love the updates, love the theme. Using it now at whateverist.wordpress.com with some buddies. The main thing i wish it had were a better way to create a link or post a photo without having to post, then edit that post and resave. I’m sure you are already on this, but I thought I would cast my vote for next change! Thanks, again.

Very cool, but we need to be able to make the icons smaller…anything that uses them in the sidebar is throwing the sidebar to the bottom of the page. With so many posts, it’s not too helpful down there. Both “Comments” and “Authors” I’ve tested have this effect. VERY FUN, VERY COOL!

Hi, in my Prologue (http://edvcafe.wordpress.com/) i can’t hide the text title of the blog (EDV CAFE) when i upload a graphic header. Could you improve it please? The other WordPress templates let to do that.

There is also a problem with the authors widget, the avatars are too much on the left side so they lay over the main area’s text.